Professor Magee on Being Present Internally and Externally

“Take a conscious breath,” instructed Rhonda V. Magee, a professor emeritus at the University of San Francisco, during her February 13th lecture at UCSB. “And as you do so, put your feet on the floor,” she continued. Magee gestured her arms around the room as the audience breathed in and out.

Magee is a mindfulness teacher and the author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness. She is also the founding Director of the Center for Contemplative Law and Ethics at the University of San Francisco. 

Through her mindfulness work, Magee highlights humanity’s interconnectedness. She emphasizes the diverse historical and cultural influences and ethical underpinnings of mindfulness. Through Magee’s lens, mindfulness is both a self-help tool and a radical act of resistance. 

Magee urges a return to mindfulness practices rooted in compassion, collective care, and cultural humility. “For me, mindfulness invites this kind of humility around what it takes to understand each other as human beings,” she shared. 

Magee examines different cultures through her mindfulness studies to effectively apply their practices. “The ethical underpinnings of mindfulness have always been about reconnecting us to all that we are, not forgetting, you know, that we’re each kind of a miracle on two feet,” she shared. “But actually, so is everybody else.” During her lecture, she urged the audience to study cultures and their mindfulness practices beyond the commercialized routines we see today. 

In her book, Magee “goes through a doorway of race.” She references her grandmother, who faced systemic barriers as a Black woman in the 1906 South, and her own experience growing up as a Black woman in the South. She encouraged the audience to draw upon their unique experiences and use them as a lens for mindfulness. “You are, by definition, already connected with a kind of circle, a cosmic community of folks,” she reminded us.

Magee views mindfulness as a way to approach our personal and shared challenges. She encourages a radical shift in how we learn, teach, and engage with the world, fostering adaptability and a sense of belonging and thriving together. Climate distress, political polarization, migration, and war are a few examples of shared problems she believes we can approach with mindfulness. 

She hopes mindfulness can heal our communities and foster unity. It is the first step to breaking down unconscious bias and systemic racism ingrained in our society. Magee believes that practicing mindfulness can unite us as people who all share the same home: Earth. 

Mindfulness has great power, and Magee teaches that by applying it to our daily lives, we can see and think more clearly, thus becoming better decision-makers. “How can that help us meet the challenges a little better?” she asked. While mindfulness has different stages, Magee stresses that everyone can commit to it. “It does require of us a willingness to change.” 

Mindfulness is as simple as listening to your intuition. She recalled a trip to Africa in September 2001, when she left early because she “had a feeling.” She listened to her gut and decided to leave Africa, arriving home on September 10th, a day before 9/11. She uses this story as an example of what being mindful can do for our everyday lives and how listening to our body’s signals can create meaningful change. 

At the end of her lecture, Magee shared the S.T.O.P. Acronym she created to facilitate mindfulness. It is a steppingstone for those interested in the practice. S means to stop what you’re doing, T means to take a deep breath, O means observing your thoughts, and P means simply proceeding with life. According to Magee, it’s a simple yet effective way to practice mindfulness.

Toward the end of her lecture, Magee picked up her cell phone and praised its ability to connect people. However, she acknowledged that these impressive devices are often to blame, distracting us from achieving mindfulness to its full extent. In a way, she says, mindfulness can be as simple as turning off the television or phone and conversing with the people around you, connecting with the world. “That’s enough,” she reminded us.